At the end of March, when Siberian wind took over all Romania, I’ve received a warm welcome from the local IT community from Iași. I took part at the SOFTVISION Open Day event at the local office.
SOFTVISION is one of the most prominent software development consultancy companies (15 years of activity) with offices in multiple locations in Romania. On March 23rd, SOFTVISION –Iasi office celebrated 2 years of activity. Iasi is one of the most vibrant cities in Romania with a high university presence and a growing community in terms of IT on different areas of knowledge.
SOFTVISION teams have been working together with Mozilla for quite some years now on different projects. Both of them have the same mission of providing an easy and open access to the unlimited options of the web for everyone through an open source product. More than that, all of these are blended with the technical motivation and passion for community that these people have. So the purpose for Open Day was to leverage both our experience with the projects so far and our passion for open source as well as for the the Mozilla community. Main expectation where set around having people from entire IT community in Iasi contributing in one way or another to the Mozilla initiatives.
We set up a Mozilla Booth and had some swag to share. People were interested to found more about Mozilla. it’s history, projects and community.
Being also a QA stand we also talked a bit about the work flow of QA on different products: Firefox for Android, Firefox, WebQA, Mozmill and Marionette. People were interested in the technologies that we use, about how we manage our testsuites and also how we analyze the result we get. A nice moment was to meet a long time contributor that has developed the Firefox Tweet Machine for Summit 2010. Awesome tool for displaying tweets for a certain hashtag.
After the booth session I held a presentation about Mozilla Community – Opportunities to contribute and Firefox OS – The web is the platform. I’ve describe different domains to contribute in like L10n, QA, PR, MDN mentioning all the good work that our local community ( Mozilla România) does. The audience was very receptive. After Firefox OS part people showed a great interes in Apps and Marketplace. Slides will be available soon on my github account. 
It was a great event, I am glad that I had the opportunity to be present in Iași. I am confident that the community will grow in this city and I am looking forward to see many apps from Romanian developers in marketplace!